


Departing on Wings

by Spylace



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), DCU, Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, M/M, Underage - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-08
Updated: 2014-01-08
Packaged: 2018-01-08 00:27:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1126197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spylace/pseuds/Spylace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU John Blake is the child in the pit</p>
            </blockquote>





	Departing on Wings

**Author's Note:**

> Repost! 
> 
> Written for the prompt - John is the child that Bane protects instead of Talia (and could even be Ra's al Ghul's son, if author wishes) and the two slowly fall in love. I'd love to see this relationship develop, especially if John could maintain a lot of the characteristics he showed in the movie rather than just becoming like his father.

The passage of time is marked by bodies. He knows that the Warden, with his keys and the meager supply of medicine, keeps a calendar somewhere, marks the walls with chalk or fingerprints or whatever cliché to enforce their status as the living hell on earth.  
  
It is a rare day when a prisoner is born and not sprung fully-formed. The babe’s cries are the most beautiful things he’s heard since he woke in his cage not a year ago. His eyes grow unerringly soft at the stricken wails, lips curling whereas they’ve always pointed down. He’s taken to keeping an eye on the proud princess and the precious bundle gurgling at her breast. He is not the only one.  
  
Everyone here is a career criminal, sinners, thieves and murderers. They are all hard men (and women) but not all of them are bad men. The Warden puts the princess in her tower and keeps the key. It is the only way to keep her safe until her father changes his mind or husband’s doubtful return.  
  
It is only a matter of time before the lock fails.  
  
The Warden regards him with red-rimmed eyes, his hands shaking as though he’s had too much to drink. “You are too young to know what you have undertaken, the sorrows you have burdened this boy. You would have done better to let him die.”  
  
“Christ” he spits. “Bite your tongue old man.”  
  
The Warden shakes his head but does as he asks, brings him gruel and soft blankets, rags to use as diapers and a piece of bone for the babe to suck on.  
  
“Has he a name?” He asks, swaddling him close.  
  
The warden snorts, “Have you?”  
  
  
He knows how the other inmates look at him, like a man deranged or a deformed thing, two-headed or two-bodied or something equally unsavory. He sticks to the shadows like he has always done, a thief, a mercenary, and a babysitter all rolled into one. But even he cannot raise a child on his own, men sniffing after him like he’s got a secret to hide other than the boy beside him.  
  
He draws the Warden into the fold, guilty for letting the girl die, and a guard, long past his prime, but with too much dirt on the others to be killed comfortably. Together, they amuse the boy and keep him safe, away from the grubby hands of lesser men who would have torn him asunder the moment they laid their eyes on him.

The boy grows like a rare seedling in the dark, as mysterious as a swirling shaft of moonlight or the glimpse of a shooting star. He never cries, not even when he told of how his mother died. He’s spent enough nights up past dawn, counting every breath and heartbeat to make sure that it hadn’t stopped suddenly in the middle of sleep.  
  
“No way.” The boy argues when he tells him of the oceans and the schools of fish as far as the eye can see, baby whales that come up to the boat if he holds his breath long enough and the snowy gulls that never touch land. The boy cannot imagine such a place, such magnitude when the shadowy well of their prison is the only thing he has ever known. Even the sky is restricted to a circular cutout in their ceiling; the sun passing overhead for an hour every day, the moon for less and the stars might as well be a handful of firebugs that sometimes drift down.  
  
And he aches for him, the boy who knows nothing, who is here because his father committed treason and his mother paid for the crime. He was born here in the dark where not even the most wretched of sounds can make him flinch and the wet slap of flesh and flesh is a mere lullaby to his tiny ears.  
  
“I can prove it.” He insists and the boy looks upon him in disdain.  
  
Chants begin when a man ties a rope around his middle and climbs the rocky ledge in an obvious bid for freedom. He will not make it. No one has ever made it and sure enough, his reach falls short and he drops like a dead weight, the rope that was supposed to save him snapping his spine in two.  
  
“Do you think that hurts?” The boy asks wondering.  
  
He can only answer, “I don’t know.”  
  
  
There are no doctors here, only a Warden who is a prisoner himself and holds the keys because he fought for them in the beginning with the broken scalpels he was tossed down with. No one dares to touch him because he is valued for his knowledge, the sole proprietor of needles and the caskets of morphine. The warden hurries towards the limp body before turning away with a quick shake of his head. Sometimes, the runners do survive. Those are rare.  
  
“Do you love me?”  
  
He finds himself kneeling, humbled and supplicant before the little boy and his dark eyes, cupping the cherubic face and drawing him close. Immediately, the boy twists their fingers together, pressing his tiny palms on top of his and he realizes that the boy is so very small, fragile, and the thought manifests as a physical hurt deep inside his bones as though they had been broken and mended and sprinkled with rain. He drops a kiss on his forehead, against his eyes and the nose.  
  
“Yes, yes I love you, more than anything else in the world.”  
  
The boy smiles and everything seems good when it is not. But the boy smiles and it is enough for him, the man who has already been dead for a long time.  
  
  
There is only so much that the stories can tell.  
  
Snow is something that is lost to him as is the winter chill. Of course, the boy understands the flow of the seasons, the wet and the dry, the bountiful and the bereft, when the sky grows dark and thunder roars past the storm-lit clouds overhead, when the night fades into a lurid dawn, when the sand blows and when it is light.  
  
But he doesn’t know that ice has more shapes than he can count or when the leaves change color, when the trees bear fruit or what a flower looks like as it blooms in the morning sun.    
  
During the day, enough light filters from the well that they can recognize faces, see shapes in the hellish prison they wrought of their own suffering. The boy smears mud across his cheeks to starve off the rabid attention but his innocence isn’t something that can so easily be concealed, hidden. If anything, the dirt illuminates the moon-white band of skin where there is none, something as pure as driven snow.  
  
Men and women covet his brief glances and the soft slope of his neck. As the boy grows, it simply makes him wary.

Despite his caution, the fool of a warden persists in indulging in bathroom spirits, leaving his keys and scalpels within easy reach. It isn’t long before the boy makes his first kill and he looks so proud, blood scalding his delicate features and a blade clutched in his tiny fist.  
  
The man he kills is thrice his height and perhaps ten-times his weight. The boy does not understand why he has done it or why the man wanted him only that murder is a reasonable answer for the trespass and that he has failed as a guardian once more.  
  
He hugs the boy close when he finds him and refuses to let him out of sight. He knows now that they cannot stay here, he cannot stay here, not when the boy is a frog and the prisoner his well. The boy may not care, he does not know anything else, but he cares and he does and that is the start of his undoing.  
  
No one has ever succeeded in what they are planning and that is why they cannot fail.

The boy stares doe-eyed and sleepy as he brushes the blood of his eyelashes, smearing it like war paint in an arch over one brow. Using what precious water they have, he washes the boy’s face, behind his ears, the white column of his neck and down his belly, his thighs, his knees and the bottom of his heels. The boy makes a small noise, choked and stifled like laughter as though it tickles.  
  
When he looks up, the boy kisses him on the mouth.  
  
He considers his first kiss, with a girl behind an alleyway on a lark. It is similar to that kiss, chaste and sweet and unsure because it is all very new. For a moment, he allows it, memorizes it and treasures it because he was never a good man. He turns his face away while he can and sees the boy stare defiant and little afraid.  
  
“Where did you learn to do that?” He asks softly, thumbing the lips which have blossomed against his pale skin.  
  
“Mahrt” The boy admits, a worried crease folding between his eyebrows. “He said it was the right way to thank someone.”  
  
He brushes his lips closed and rests his head against the boy’s, safe and indulgent as he swears, “I will kill him.”  
  
The boy simply looks puzzled at the remark.  
  
  
Down here, there is no need for names and the boy has none for the girl who was his mother foretold that his father would come for them and give him his true name. He wonders what the girl might have named him had he been a girl for there is far more of her in him than any absent father.  
  
The boy reminds him of a bird, exquisite and fleeting, and from what he sees under their stone chimney, it becomes his favorite story and asks for it over and over, of scarlet ibises and their curved bills, birds of paradise more colorful than any treasures under the sun. He asks for eagles whose gaze is wide and birds that cannot fly at all but are content racing the winds. He asks for his namesake, the petit robin which he has seen only once in his travels, red-breasted with a wealth of turquoise blue in his nest.  
  
The boy asks him of many things though he never believes as a boy ought, only the things he’s seen and experienced, never the things told secondhand. And there is a dearth of things down here that could stimulate his imagination. It is more than a passing regret that the boy, an innocent, may never know the small joy in pretending pebbles as soldiers and sticks their steed, warm honey snatched from jars or spitting seeds from trees.  
  
Their time comes much sooner than he expected though none of it is their fault. Only the men in the pit have grown bold in their silence and one dares to grab the boy and draws out a startled cry as he might droplets of blood. The boy quickly breaks his wrists and sticks a spoon in his left eye but the damage is already done.  
  
There are men coming for them, reaching for the boy unfit to be sullied by their hands. The fist he throws returns as volleys to his back, to his stomach, to his face and the twisted knee. He thrusts the boy on the rocky ledge and sees him perched precariously like the bird he was named after, the bird he has never seen. And as he jumps, it is as though he has grown wings and the men and women who hung back in the shadows, who still have a glimpse of humanity left in their weary bodies, chant throatily in rising voices and drown out all sound.  
  
The boy turns to look at him one last time, his eyes wide and never known fear but also never dreamed what it means to be truly alone.  
  
 _‘Goodbye...'_  
  
  
His wakes up in pain.  
  
The Warden wheezes and slaves over his broken body, face, pumping him full of drugs that leave him disoriented until he cannot tell what is up and what is down. He is given the peace of a holding cell where all new prisoners were once kept, where the princess and the boy lived, to acclimatize and live long enough to be of worth in their grim little world.  
  
No one can touch him here save for fools spiteful enough to waste what little they hold onto his ravaged body. Only the Warden and the gray-haired guard wet his throat and keep his wounds clean. They think that he may die, he doesn’t.  
  
He heals in spite of himself. His bone knit of their own accord, the cuts fade into scars, lesions scabbed over until they resemble skin. But his body mends wrong, his spine is crooked and he cannot move. It isn’t until he finds himself tethered to the morphine drip that he realizes that he might as well be dead, men circling like hungry dogs for him to step outside his cell.  
  
But the morphine is a finite resource and he is soon cut off. In his rage, pain, he drags the Warden down with him and mauls him like the beast he was known as when he still walked above. The Warden’s value lies in his ability to heal and he has healed enough to know that it isn’t worth it, the pain isn’t worth it and he cripples the man into a mirror of himself, bowed, bent and broken.  
  
He spends his days lost in a daze. The sun passes over him once a day, the moon, then the stars. What small measure of comfort he holds is the memory of his little bird, the clever bird, who had the courage to fly. And for the briefest of seconds, he is content.

There are men snaking down from ropes, not thrown down, and the inmates approach them with rabid enthusiasm of a jackal chasing bait. They are allowed within reaching distance before being cut down gracefully, the spray of arterial blood painting the rocks with slickness that is a prelude to the rain. The newly-elected Warden and the guards hang back shooting him knowing looks. But he misses it completely because he is tired of trying to breathe. He only wishes that they had put him out of misery along with the rest. Surely he, out of everyone else, deserves the haunting prospect of oblivion.  
  
A man kneels before him with a wicked blade in his hand. He meets his gaze and sees the startled surprise in the other man’s eyes, grey and stormy, wholly unlike the warm dusk of his little bird.  
  
He tilts his head back in an offering, goading the man to take a cut, to press the knife at his throat and end it right there. But soft steps herald the presence of another beside him, warm and clean even through the fetid bandages shrouding his skin.  
  
“Hello old friend.”  
  
He gurgles in answer. It is him, the boy, the little bird with his blood-red breast.  
  
“Father, this is Bane.”  
  
The princess’s love was a mercenary and in turn she gave birth to a little boy more precious than anything anyone’s had the right to touch. Bane fingers a yellowing bruise on the side of his arm as he is carried out, fighting to keep conscious but happier than he has been in days, heartbroken and grieving as the words spill past his ear, a tired story that has been repeated too many times to count.  
  
 _I dreamed of better for you_ he thinks, but all he manages is a faint “who”.  
  
“It doesn’t matter.” The boy says impatiently, no longer a boy after all, closing their fingers together.  
  
“But...”  
  
“Rest”  
  
  
Sleep comes in stages.  
  
Sometimes it’s just him, the boy who has grown to be a man in the short time he was away.  
  
No, that is wrong. Maybe like others, perhaps the boy did emerge from the pit full-formed. It was only when he saw the world that his body began to grow like the sunflower turning its head towards the sun.  
  
“You’re hurt.” He growls when he sees the newest hurts, the stiffness of his shoulders and fingerprints down his neck.  
  
“I am fine.” The boy says serenely as he traces the collapsed bridge of his nose and his ruined face. “How are you doing?”  
  
He is always accompanied by a guard when he visits. Today, it is Barsad, a whip-thin fellow with sharp eyes and an even sharper mouth. He is not the kind of a man he’d admit weaknesses to and he tells the boy who is no longer a boy but a bird fledged and flown. To Barsad’s eternal displeasure, the boy merely sighs and carries on with his one-sided conversation. “In my journey, I saw everything you have told me about and more. Creatures who never sip a drop of water and dolphins who swim fearlessly through the sea. But never was I happier than when I am with you.”  
  
He would like to gape but he cannot.  
  
The boy pats him on one shoulder as the corners of his eyes crease into a smile.  
  
“So get better alright?”  
  
  
There are days when the boy does not come. On those days, Barsad comes in his stead and takes up watch outside his door. Neither are big talkers but he cannot help but wonder what has happened to his little bird. The first overture towards friendship comes in the shape of a glass, shattered at the mercenary’s feet.  
  
To his credit, Barsad does not flinch.  
  
“Where is he?”  
  
“Training”  
  
“Is he alright?” He asks suspiciously as though willing the other man to look at him. It would change nothing; he has been bound to his bed for days as his bones are set anew and he is weaned off the more potent drugs. He will never be the man he once was nor will he recover from the need for analgesics but it is worth it—it has to be.  
  
Barsad gives him an imperceptible nod at his attempt to rise.  
  
“He will be.”  
  
  
The boy storms in, his cheeks blotched red and angry. He holds his arm at an awkward angle, all but dragging his left leg. He slumps down on his chair in relief and smiles a little at his stunned expression.  
  
“Bad day” He explains, Barsad retorting “He lies”.  
  
“Barsad” the boy growls in warning.  
  
“He hurt you.”  
  
The boy turns towards him unhappily. “He trains me old friend. It’s an acceptable payment.”  
  
“I didn’t get you out so you could be held like a battered wife.” He spits, ignoring Barsad bristling in the doorway.  
  
“No,” The boy sighs “You got me out so I could live.” His gaze softens at the reminder, stiff fingers weaving through the dark curls. “Tell me about the birds again please?” The boy begs, head buried somewhere against his chest.  
  
“Will you get yourself taken care of?”  
  
“Yeah”  
  
  
The boy laughs and it is beautiful but it was not he who taught the boy and he feels a burst of irrational jealousy at the thought, pulling the boy close until they are almost in the same bed side by side, sharing the warmth and the same air. His laughter peters off into a badly concealed grin, made worse by the line of teeth fighting to keep his lips sealed.  
  
“Have you a name yet?”  
  
“I always did.” The boy quips pressing their heads close, taking care not to ruin the lines around his body. “Or if you’re asking me for the one father gave me, it’s Dusan.”  
  
“ _Dusan_ ” He repeats hoarsely, the word foreign on his tongue.  
  
Privately the boy whispers, “I don’t like it.”  
  
“But it’s yours.”  
  
“You’re mine.” The boy says firmly, “You’re all I’ve ever wanted.”  
  
“Robin.”  
  
The boy smiles.  
  
  
The day he can stand is the day he is to be executed. Ra’s Al Ghul has never liked him, that much was always clear. He is the reminder of the girl the man failed, the son he lost and the heir standing before him, every bit as proud as though he was the sultan himself.  
  
“He is dangerous!”  
  
“He saved my life!”  
  
“You are my son and you will obey me in this.”  
  
The boy draws his sword as the men close in.  
  
He drops his head. He’s never wanted anyone to kill for him. But at the last second, the little bird winks.  
  
  
When they get out, it is as though a dam bursts free. Bane cannot stop the apologies any more than the tender kisses the boy presses upon his brow. The boy is gentle as he leads him away into the forest green, only a survival pack to share between them, a lengthy rope and forged papers so paltry they are better off sneaking through borders on foot.  
  
“It’s okay.” The boy says hugging him tight and crying into his shoulder. “We got out, we’re okay.”  
  
The Warden was wrong after all.  
  
The boy coaxes him into a kiss and this time there is no hesitation.  
  
Through the leafy grove, a robin sings.

**Author's Note:**

> Now with a [podfic](http://www.mediafire.com/?wkz2ppf1irnwbqe) by [chestnut-filly](http://chestnut-filly.livejournal.com/)!


End file.
